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Pioneers vs. Process People
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8 min read
Today is my last day at Merantix Healthcare. While I am very sad to leave behind a stellar team which I helped build, it’s the right thing for me to do. Why? At any company, there are multiple projects going on: Developing a product, getting regulatory approval, recruiting for a team.. you get it. Whatever…
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Become a Full-Stack Person
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6 min read
Let’s look at how most software is developed. I’m not talking about those shiny SaaS products like Slack. Those were built for developers, by other developers. No, I’m talking about the large underwater iceberg of boring software running enterprises, governments, hospitals and nuclear reactors. Real-world software. Software outside the Silicon Valley tech bubble. How does any such…
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The (Un-)Natural Progression of Machine Learning
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5 min read
Machine Learning is everywhere. Unfortunately. Most industries aren’t ready for it. We tend to ignore the natural progression of software. To illustrate this, let’s look at an example: Written communication. In the beginning, there was no software. There were only paper letters, typed on a type writer and sent off via snail mail. Communicating was…
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I Wanted a CO2 Sensor, I Got a Fart Detector
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5 min read
In the everlasting quest of optimizing my sleep, I recently started measuring air quality in my bedroom. I hope to write up the setup at a later time; here, I’ll focus on some surprising results. I used a sensor to measure equivalent CO2 (eCO2) and Total Volatile Organic Compounds (TVOC). The Morning Spike The first…
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The Rush of Shipping
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7 min read
Recently, one of my posts made Hacker News #1. That brought back childhood memories. The Paidmail Site When I was thirteen, I launched a hacky Paidmail site. The concept was simple: You signed up to receive ad e-mails. At the end of the month, you got money in proportion to how many e-mails you had received. How…
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Don’t Be an Engineer, Be a Producer
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3 min read
I’m currently reading Range by David Epstein [1]. I was deeply impressed by the section about Gunpei Yokoi, the guy at Nintendo who was the driving force behind the NES and Game Boy. I have fond memories of the Game Boy; everyone who was a kid in the nineties does. This awesome thing you could hold in our hands,…
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Businesspeople Are Useless
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4 min read
Interacting with businesspeople never ceases to amaze me. They presume that they’re qualified to run companies. Why? Because they are businesspeople. What makes a good businessperson, anyway? There seems to be a factory-like process of creating “great” businesspeople: Take some random people with above-average self-confidence. Toss them into business school, teach them how to write…
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Zigbee-enabled light bulbs. Wifi-connected air purifiers. Autonomous thermostats. The smart home. Great technology. And just like with machine learning and blockchain, we humans don’t quite know yet what to do with it yet. Similar to those technologies, the smart home offers solutions for non-existent problems. Now I can control my light bulbs from an app…
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We need more Hackers
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6 min read
The Hacker’s First Project When I was a kid, I wanted to code my own website. I was already using Dreamweaver to crank out static HTML web pages but this was different. I needed to learn PHP to create a website which would earn passive income for the rest of my life. Very important! The…
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Making My Own Glasses
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12 min read
It’s a long weekend, I’m standing in my flat, 10 lenses scattered across the desk in front of me. I’m wearing weird glasses consisting of an empty plastic frame and some lenses stuck into it. I squint out of the window, trying to read number plates of cars parked in the street. What happened? It…